CHAPTER VIII

BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH

Knightly ideals and honor--Thirty adolescents from

Shakespeare--Goethe--C.D. Warner--Aldrich--The fugitive nature of

adolescent experience--Extravagance of autobiographies--Stories that

attach to great names--Some typical crazes--Illustrations from George

Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley,

Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Agassiz, Madame

Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff,

Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and

scores of others.

The knightly ideals and those of secular life generally during the

middle ages and later were in striking contrast to the ascetic ideals

of the early Christian Church; in some respects they were like those

of the Greeks. Honor was the leading ideal, and muscular development

and that of the body were held in high respect; so that the spirit of

the age fostered conceptions not unlike those of the Japanese Bushido.

Where elements of Christianity were combined with this we have the

spirit of the pure chivalry of King Arthur and the Knights of the

Round Table, which affords perhaps the very best ideals for youth to

be found in history, as we shall see more fully later.

In a very interesting paper, entitled "Shakespeare and Adolescence,"

Dr. M.F. Libby[1] very roughly reckons "seventy-four interesting

adolescents among the comedies, forty-six among the tragedies, and

nineteen among the histories." He selects "thirty characters who,

either on account of direct references to their age, or because of

their love-stories, or because they show the emotional and

intellectual plasticity of youth, may be regarded as typical

adolescents." His list is as follows: Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia,

Imogen, Perdita, Arviragus, Guiderius, Palamon, Arcite, Emilia,

Ferdinand, Miranda, Isabella, Mariana, Orlando, Rosalind, Biron,

Portia, Jessica, Phebe, Katharine, Helena, Viola, Troilus, Cressida,

Cassio, Marina, Prince Hal, and Richard of Gloucester. The proof of

the youth of these characters, as set forth, is of various kinds, and

Libby holds that besides these, the sonnets and poems perhaps show a

yet greater, more profound and concentrated knowledge of adolescence.

He thinks "Venus and Adonis" a successful attempt to treat sex in a

candid, naive way, if it be read as it was meant, as a catharsis of

passion, in which is latent a whole philosophy of art. To some extent

he also finds the story of the Passionate Pilgrim "replete with the

deepest knowledge of the passions of early adolescence" The series

culminates in Sonnet 116, which makes love the sole beacon of

humanity. It might be said that it is connected by a straight line

with the best teachings of Plato, and that here humanity picked up the

clue, lost, save with some Italian poets, in the great interval.

In looking over current autobiographies of well-known modern men who

deal with their boyhood, one finds curious extremes. On the one hand

are those of which Doctor's is a type, where details are dwelt upon at

great length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflections. The

development of his own tastes, capacities, and his entire adult

consciousness was assumed to be due to the incidents of childhood and

youth, and especially the latter stage was to him full of the most

serious problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of

his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic

period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer.

At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a

self-made man, whose early life was passed on the farm, and who holds

his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other

reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated

not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery and catchy

superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon

the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the precious

associations of early life on a New England farm are not only made

absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not a scintilla of

instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life.

Aldrich[3] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet

horse and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and

falling in love with an older girl whose engagement later blighted his

life. Howells,[4] White,[5] Mitter,[6] Grahame,[7] Heidi,[8] and Mrs.

Barnett,[9] might perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in this

field in this respect.

Yoder,[10] in his interesting study of the boyhood of great men, has

called attention to the deplorable carelessness of their biographers

concerning the facts and influences of their youth. He advocates the

great pedagogic influence of biography, and would restore the high

appreciation of it felt by the Bolandists, which Comte's positivist

calendar, that renamed all the days of the year from three hundred and

sixty-five such accounts in 1849, also sought to revive. Yoder

selected fifty great modern biographies, autobiographies preferred,

for his study. He found a number of lives whose equipment and momentum

have been strikingly due to some devoted aunt, and that give many

glimpses of the first polarization of genius in the direction in which

fame is later achieved. He holds that, while the great men excelled in

memory, imagination is perhaps still more a youthful condition of

eminence; magnifies the stimulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons

become prominent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises the

question whether too exuberant physical development does not dull

genius and talent.

One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its

each and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of

adolescence are extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so

that they are often totally lost to the adult consciousness.

Lancaster[11] observes that we are constantly told by adults past

thirty that they never had this and that experience, and that those

who have had them are abnormal; that they are far more rare than

students of childhood assert, etc. He says, "Not a single young person

with whom I have had free and open conversation has been free from

serious thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. A typical

case of many I could gather is that of a lady, not yet in middle life,

precise and carefully trained, who, on hearing a lecture on the

typical phases of adolescence, declared that she must have been

abnormal, for she knew nothing of any of these experiences. Her

mother, however, produced her diary, and there she read for the first

time since it was written, beginning in the January of her thirteenth

year, a long series of resolutions which revealed a course of conduct

that brought the color to her face, that she should have found it

necessary to pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and which showed

conclusively that she had passed through about all the phases

described. These phenomena are sometimes very intense and may come

late in life, but it is impossible to remember feelings and emotions

with definiteness, and these now make up a large part of life. Hence

we are prone to look with some incredulity upon the immediate records

of the tragic emotions and experiences typical and normal at this

time, because development has scored away their traces from the

conscious soul.

There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says White,[12] in

substance, which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon

youth. An adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games

inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself banished among the

purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when Nineveh was a

hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rulers and idols; and

only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed.

In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true

pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can

rarely be ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall

the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished

without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries,

chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the best

observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul,

the development of which is very largely subterranean. Only when the

feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The

best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are

full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric

stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often

reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating

plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to

eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again,

concerning the youth of men who later achieve distinction, which

biographers often incorporate and attach to the time, place, and

person of their heroes.

As Burnham[13] well intimates, many of the literary characterizations

of adolescence are so marked by extravagance, and sometimes even by

the struggle for literary effects, that they are not always the best

documents, although often based on personal experience.

Confessionalism is generally overdrawn, distorted, and especially the

pains of this age are represented as too keen. Of George Eliot's types

of adolescent character, this may best be seen in Maggie Tulliver,

with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her volcanic upheavings

of imprisoned passions," with her "wide, hopeless yearning for that

something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth,"

and in Gwendolen, who, from the moment she caught Deronda's eye, was

"totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of

the other sex whom she had never seen before." There was "the resolute

action from instinct and the setting at defiance of calculation and

reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, while all her

conduct tended to promote proposals." Exaggeration, although not the

perversions of this age often found in adult characterizations, is

marked trait of the writings of adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile

may appear rational, so that this suggests that consciousness may at

this stage serve as a harmless vent for tendencies that would

otherwise cause great trouble if turned to practical affairs. If

Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the adolescent tyrant slayers of Greece,

had been theorists, they might have been harmless on the principle

that its analysis tends to dissipate emotion.

Lancaster[14] gathered and glanced over a thousand biographies, from

which he selected 200 for careful study, choosing them to show

different typical directions of activity. Of these, 120 showed a

distinct craze for reading in adolescence; 109 became great lovers of

nature; 58 wrote poetry, 58 showed a great and sudden development of

energy; 55 showed great eagerness for school; 53 devoted themselves

for a season to art and music; 53 became very religious; 51 left home

in the teens; 51 showed dominant instincts of leadership; 49 had great

longings of many kinds; 46 developed scientific tastes; 41 grew very

anxious about the future; 34 developed increased keenness of sensation

or at least power of observation; in 32 cases health was better; 31

were passionately altruistic; 23 became idealists; 23 showed powers of

invention; 17 were devoted to older friends; 15 would reform society;

7 hated school. These, like many other statistics, have only

indicative value, as they are based on numbers that are not large

enough and upon returns not always complete.

A few typical instances from Lancaster must here suffice. Savonarola

was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the

world and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night

planning his career. Shelley during these years was unsocial, much

alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and

moon, was attached to an older man. Beecher was intoxicated with

nature, which he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of

his life. George Eliot at thirteen had a passion for music and became

a clever pianist. At sixteen she was religious, founded societies for

the poor and for animals, and had fitting spells of misanthropy.

Edison undertook to read the Detroit Free Library through, read

fifteen solid feet as the books stand on the shelves, was stopped, and

says he has read comparatively little since. Tolstoi found the aspect

of things suddenly changed. Nature put on a new appearance. He felt he

might commit the most dreadful crimes with no purpose save curiosity

and the need of action. The future looked gloomy. He became furiously

angry without cause; thought he was lost, hated by everybody, was

perhaps not the son of his father, etc. At seventeen he was solitary,

musing about immortality, human destiny, feeling death at hand, giving

up his studies, fancying himself a great man with new truths for

humanity. By and by he took up the old virtuous course of life with

fresh power, new resolutions, with the feeling that he had lost much

time. He had a deep religious experience at seventeen and wept for joy

over his new life. He had a period before twenty when he told

desperate lies, for which he could not account, then a passion for

music, and later for French novels. Rousseau at this age was

discontented, immensely in love, wept often without cause, etc. Keats

had a great change at fourteen, wrestling with frequent obscure and

profound stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowledge which

consumed his days with fire, and "with passionate longing to drain the

cup of experience at a draft." He was "at the morning hour when the

whole world turns to gold." "The boy had suddenly become a poet."

Chatterton was too proud to eat a gift dinner, though nearly starved,

and committed suicide at seventeen for lack of appreciation. John

Hunter was dull and hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did

that of Patrick Henry, who before was a lonely wanderer, sitting idly

for hours under the trees. Alexander Murray awoke to life at fifteen

and acquired several languages in less than two years. Gifford was

distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a

shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable,

sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and

vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen

was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite

time and space. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a frenzy for sciences

at fifteen; at seventeen walked nine miles daily to attend lectures at

Cambridge; and at nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. Franklin

had a passion for the sea; at thirteen read poetry all night; wrote

verses and sold them on the streets of Boston; doubted everything at

fifteen; left home for good at seventeen; started the first public

library in Philadelphia before he was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was

poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. He

became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home at seventeen.

Bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently well

thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for

poetic genius and wrote Thanatopsis before he was eighteen. Jefferson

doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seventeen studied

fifteen hours a day. Garfield, though living in Ohio, longed for the

sea, and ever after this period the sight of a ship gave him a strange

thrill. Hawthorne was devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on and on

forever and never touch shore again. He would roam through the Maine

woods alone; was haunted by the fear that he would die before

twenty-five. Peter Cooper left home at seventeen; was passionately

altruistic; and at eighteen vowed he would build a place like his New

York Institute. Whittier at fourteen found a copy of Burns, which

excited him and changed the current of his life. Holmes had a passion

for flowers, broke into poetry at fifteen, and had very romantic

attachments to certain trees. J. T. Trowbridge learned German, French,

and Latin alone before twenty-one; composed poetry at the plow and

wrote it out in the evening. Henry followed a rabbit under the Public

Library at Albany, found a hole in the floor that admitted him to the

shelves, and, unknown to any one, read all the fiction the library

contained, then turned to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and

developed a passion for the sciences. He was stage-struck, and became

a good amateur actor. H. H. Boyesen was thrilled by nature and by the

thought that he was a Norseman. He had several hundred pigeons,

rabbits, and other pets; loved to be in the woods at night; on leaving

home for school was found with his arms around the neck of a calf to

which he was saying good-by. Maxwell, at sixteen, had almost a horror

of destroying a leaf, flower, or fly. Jahn found growing in his heart,

at this age, an inextinguishable feeling for right and wrong--which

later he thought the cause of all his inner weal and outer woe. When

Nansen was in his teens he spent weeks at a time alone in the forest,

full of longings, courage, altruism, wanted to get away from every one

and live like Crusoe. T. B. Reed, at twelve and thirteen, had a

passion for reading; ran away at seventeen; painted, acted, and wrote

poetry. Cartwright, at sixteen, heard voices from the sky saying,

"Look above, thy sins are forgiven thee." Herbert Spencer became an

engineer at seventeen, after one idle year. He never went to school,

but was a private pupil of his uncle. Sir James Mackintosh grew fond

of history at eleven; fancied he was the Emperor of Constantinople;

loved solitude at thirteen; wrote poetry at fourteen; and fell in love

at seventeen. Thomas Buxton loved dogs, horses, and literature, and

combined these while riding on an old horse. At sixteen be fell in

love with an older literary woman, which aroused every latent power to

do or die, and thereafter he took all the school prizes. Scott began

to like poetry at thirteen. Pascal wrote treatises on conic sections

at sixteen and invented his arithmetical machine at nineteen. Nelson

went to sea at twelve; commanded a boat in peril at fifteen, which at

the same age he left to fight a polar bear. Banks, the botanist, was

idle and listless till fourteen, could not travel the road marked out

for him; when coming home from bathing, he was struck by the beauty of

the flowers and at once began his career. Montcalm and Wolfe both

distinguished themselves as leaders in battle at sixteen. Lafayette

came to America at nineteen, thrilled by our bold strike for liberty.

Gustavus Adolphus declared his own majority at seventeen and was soon

famous. Ida Lewis rescued four men in a boat at sixteen. Joan of Arc

began at thirteen to have the visions which were the later guide of

her life.

Mr. Swift has collected interesting biographical material[15] to show

that school work is analytic, while life is synthetic, and how the

narrowness of the school enclosure prompts many youth in the wayward

age to jump fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. According

to school standards, many were dull and indolent, but their nature was

too large or their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at

the Nikolaischule at Leipzig was relegated to the third form, having

already attained to the second at Dresden, which so embittered him

that he lost all taste for philology and, in his own words, "became

lazy and slovenly." Priestley never improved by any systematic course

of study. W.H. Gibson was very slow and was rebuked for wasting his

time in sketching. James Russell Lowell was reprimanded, at first

privately and then publicly, in his sophomore year "for general

negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally

suspended in 1838 "on account of continued neglect of his college

duties." In early life Goldsmith's teacher thought him the dullest boy

she had ever taught. His tutor called him ignorant and stupid. Irving

says that a lad "whose passions are not strong enough in youth to

mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his

inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance,

will probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow.

I would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the

tranquility of dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment,

and, consequently, continue always muddy." Huxley detested writing

till past twenty. His schooling was very brief, and he declared that

those set over him "cared about as much for his intellectual and moral

welfare as if they were baby farmers." Humphry Davy was faithful but

showed no talent in school, having "the reputation of being an idle

boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no aptitude for studies

of a graver sort." Later in life he considered it fortunate that he

was left so much to himself. Byron was so poor a scholar that he only

stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, it was

inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly said to him, "Now,

George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." Schiller's

negligence and lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his

final school thesis was unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor scholar, and

at the university it was stated "that he was of middling industry and

knowledge but especially deficient in philosophy." John Hunter nearly

became a cabinetmaker. Lyell had excessive aversion to work. George

Combe wondered why he was so inferior to other boys in arithmetic.

Heine agreed with the monks that Greek was the invention of the devil.

"God knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated French meters,

and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry. He idled away his

time at Bonn, and was "horribly bored" by the "odious, stiff,

cut-and-dried tone" of the leathery professors. Humboldt was feeble as

a child and "had less facility in his studies than most children."

"Until I reached the age of sixteen," he says, "I showed little

inclination for scientific pursuits." He was essentially self-taught,

and acquired most of his knowledge rather late in life. At nineteen he

had never heard of botany. Sheridan was called inferior to many of his

schoolfellows. He was remarkable for nothing but idleness and winning

manners, and was "not only slovenly in construing, but unusually

defective in his Greek grammar." Swift was refused his degree because

of "dulness and insufficiency," but given it later as a special favor.

Wordsworth was disappointing. General Grant was never above

mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the junior class and served

the last year as a private. W. H. Seward was called "too stupid to

learn." Napoleon graduated forty-second in his class. "Who," asks

Swift, "were the forty-one above him?" Darwin was singularly incapable

of mastering any language. "When he left school," he says, "I was

considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy,

rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep

mortification, my father once said to me, 'You care for nothing but

shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to

yourself and to all your family.'" Harriet Martineau was thought very

dull. Though a horn musician, she could do absolutely nothing in the

presence of her irritable master. She wrote a cramped, untidy scrawl

until past twenty. A visit to some very brilliant cousins at the age

of sixteen had much to do in arousing her backward nature. At this age

J. Pierpont Morgan wrote poetry and was devoted to mathematics. Booker

T. Washington, at about thirteen or fourteen (he does not know the

date of his birth), felt the new meaning of life and started off on

foot to Hampton, five hundred miles away, not knowing even the

direction, sleeping under a sidewalk his first night in Richmond.

Vittorino da Feltre,[16] according to Dr. Burnham, had a low, tardy

development, lingering on a sluggish dead level from ten to fourteen,

which to his later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years

sometimes called the middle ages, compared with the remainder which

followed when a new world-consciousness intensified his personality.

Lancaster's summaries show that of 100 actors, the average age of

their first great success was exactly 18 years. Those he chose had

taken to the stage of their own accord, for actors are more born than

made. Nearly half of them were Irish, the unemotional American stock

having furnished far less. Few make their first success on the stage

after 22, but from 16 to 20 is the time to expect talent in this line,

although there is a second rise in his curve before and still more

after 25, representing those whose success is more due to intellect.

Taking the average age of 100 novelists when their first story met

with public approval, the curve reaches its highest point between 30

and 35. Averaging 53 poets, the age at which most first poems were

published falls between 15 and 20. The average age at which first

publication showed talent he places at 18, which is in striking

contrast with the average age of inventors at time of the first

patent, which is 33 years.

A still more striking contrast is that between 100 musicians and 100

professional men. Music is by far the most precocious and instinctive

of all talents. The average age when marked talent was first shown is

a little less than 10 years, 95 per cent showed rare talent before 16,

while the professional men graduated at an average age of 24 years and

11 months, and 10 years must be added to mark the point of recognized

success. Of 53 artists, 90 per cent showed talent before 20, the

average age being 17.2 years. Of 100 pioneers who made their mark in

the Far West, leaving home to seek fortunes near the frontier, the

greatest number departed before they were 18. Of 118 scientists,

Lancaster estimates that their life interest first began to glow on

the average a little before they were 19. In general, those whose

success is based on emotional traits antedate by some years those

whose renown is more purely in intellectual spheres, and taking all

together, the curves of the first class culminate between 18 and 20.

While men devoted to physical science, and their biographers, give us

perhaps the least breezy accounts of this seething age, it may be,

because they mature late, nearly all show its ferments and its

circumnutations, as a few almost random illustrations clearly show:

Tycho Brahe, born in 1596 of illustrious Danish stock, was adopted by

an uncle, and entered the University of Copenhagen at thirteen, where

multiplication, division, philosophy, and metaphysics were taught.

When he was fourteen, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which aroused so

much interest that he decided to devote himself to the study of the

heavenly bodies. He was able to construct a series of interesting

instruments on a progressive scale of size, and finally to erect the

great Observatory of Uraniberg on the Island of Hven. Strange to say,

his scientific conclusions had for him profound astrological

significance. An important new star he declared was "at first like

Venus and Jupiter and its effects will therefore first be pleasant;

but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of

wars, seditions, captivity, and death of princes, and destruction of

cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air,

pestilence, and venomous snakes. Lastly, the star became like Saturn,

and thus will finally come a time of want, death, imprisonment, and

all kinds of sad things!" He says that "a special use of astronomy is

that it enables us to draw conclusions from the movements in the

celestial regions as to human fate." He labored on his island twenty

years. He was always versifying, and inscribed a poem over the

entrance of his underground observatory expressing the astonishment of

Urania at finding in the interior of the earth a cavern devoted to the

study of the heavens.

Galileo[17] was born in 1564 of a Florentine noble, who was poor. As a

youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself

to painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the

University of Pisa fell in love with mathematics.

Isaac Newton,[18] born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a

very low piece in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at

sixteen tried farming. In one of his university examinations in Euclid

be did so poorly as to incur special censure. His first incentive to

diligent study came from being severely kicked by a high class boy. He

then resolved to pass him in studies, and soon rose to the head of the

school. He made many ingenious toys and windmills; a carriage, the

wheels of which were driven by the hands of the occupants, and a clock

which moved by water; curtains, kites, lanterns, etc.; and before he

was fourteen fell in love with Miss Storey, several yeas older than

himself. He entered Trinity College at Cambridge at eighteen.

William Herschel, born in 1738, at the outbreak of the Seven Years'

War, when he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and

after a battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to

England, where he eked out a precarious livelihood by teaching music.

He supported himself until middle age as an organist. In much of his

later work he was greatly aided by his sister Caroline. When he

discovered a sixth planet he became famous, and devoted himself

exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his

footsteps, and dying in 1822.

Agassiz[19] at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He

memorized Latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of

MSS.", and "modestly expressed the hope that in time he might be able

to give the name of every known animal." At fourteen he revolted at

mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a manifesto

planning to spend four years at a Cermem university, then in Paris,

when he could begin to write. Rooks were scarce, and a little later he

copied, with the aid of his brother, several large volumes, and had

fifty live birds in his room at one time.

At twelve Huxley[20] became an omnivorous reader, and two or three

years later devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply interested in

metaphysics. At fourteen he saw and participated in his first

post-mortem examination, was left in a strange state of apathy by it,

and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this experience. His training was

irregular; he taught himself German with a book in one hand while he

made hay with the other; speculated about the basis of matter, soul,

and their relations, on radicalism and conservatism; and reproached

himself that he did not work and get on enough. At seventeen he

attempted a comprehensive classification of human knowledge, and

having finished his survey, resolved to master the topics one after

another, striking them out from his table with ink as soon us they

were done. "May the list soon get black, although at present I shall

hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper." Beneath the top

skimmings of these years he afterward conceived seething depths

working beneath the froth, but could give hardly any account of it. He

undertook the practise of pharmacy, etc.

Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to

reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions

of this age; perhaps because their later lives, on account of their

more generic nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or

because, although it is psychologically shorter than in men, the

necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently arrest its full

development, and again because they are more emotional, and feeling

constitutes the chief psychic ingredient of this stage of life, or

they dwell more on subjective states.

Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. Her father was an

engraver in comfortable circumstances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for

the Bible and Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for

reading books of any kind. In the corner of her father's workshop she

would read Plutarch for hours, dream of the past glories of antiquity,

and exclaim, weeping, "Why was I not born a Greek?" She desired to

emulate the brave men of old.

Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic

sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society

afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she

fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St.

Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new idols. She longed to follow

even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne obloquy,

poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's

death for the sake of Jesus. Her capacities for self-sacrifice became

perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life like

George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. She was allowed at the age of eleven

to enter a convent, where, shunning her companions, she courted

solitude apart, under the trees, reading and thinking. Artificial as

the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life with permanent

tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a mystic

quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full

revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon

youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she

came to doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but clung to the

Gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later realized that

while her intellect had wandered her heart had remained constant. At

seventeen she was, if not the moat beautiful, perhaps the noblest

woman in all France, and here the curtain moat drop upon her girlhood.

All her traits were, of course, set off by the great life she lived

and the yet greater death she died.

Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more

children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents,

because of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius

that the plasticity and spontaneity of adolescence persists into

maturity. Sometimes even its passions, reveries, and hoydenish freaks

continue. In her "Histoire de Ma Vie," it is plain that George Sand

inherited at this age an unusual dower of gifts. She composed many and

interminable stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants

tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got out of the forest

yet, etc. She personated an echo and conversed with it. Her day-dreams

and plays were so intense that she often came back from the world of

imagination to reality with a shock. She spun a weird zoological

romance out of a rustic legend of _la grande bête_.

When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion

and revolt, and was the leader of _les diables_, or those who refused

to be devout, and engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became

profoundly interested in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing

miracles. She entered one evening the convent church for service,

without permission, which was an act of disobedience. The mystery and

holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot everything outward and was

left alone, and some mysterious change stole over her. She "breathed

an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness" more with the mind than the

senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes swam; she

was enveloped in a white glimmer, and heard a voice murmur the words

written under a convent picture of St. Augustine, _Tolle, lege,_ and

turned around thinking Mother Alicia spoke, but she was alone. She

knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had laid hold of her,

as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and prayed to the unknown

God till a nun heard her groaning. At first her ardor impelled her not

only to brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums and

tomboys, but she planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing

for a recluse life passed, but left her changed.[21]

When she passed from the simple and Catholic faith of her grisette

mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at Nohant, who was

a disciple of Voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the

profound sentiments inspired by the first communion and the concurrent

contempt for this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all those

mummeries through which, however, for conventional reasons she was

obliged to pass. Her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head

holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to

invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be

a story into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will.

The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream.

He was Corambé, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful as

the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian God, and as

much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex from her

love for her mother. He appeared in many aspects of physical and moral

beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic

of musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the

same time revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability,

but with the fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she

composed about a thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of

his mundane existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on

touching the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet

suffering martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of

their malice. In this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in

the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There

must be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a

garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted

chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a

wreath hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric,

she proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards,

green frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and

"after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection,"

opened it. In these mimic rites and delicious reveries she found the

germs of a religion that fitted her heart. From the instant, however,

that a boy playmate discovered and entered this sanctuary, "Corambé

ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it," and

it seemed unreal. The temple was destroyed with great care, and the

garlands and shells were buried under the tree.[22]

Louisa Alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, when she began to

write poetry, keep a heart journal, and wander by moonlight, and

wished to be the Bettine of Emerson, in whose library she foraged;

wrote him letters which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at

midnight; left wild flowers on the doorstep of her master; sang

Mignon's song under his window; and was refined by her choice of an

idol. Her diary was all about herself.

If she looked in the glass at her long hair and well-shaped head, she

tried to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, poverty,

impossible longings, made every day a battle until she hardly wished

to live, only something must be done, and waiting is so hard. She

imagined her mind a room in confusion which must be put in order; the

useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly

furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good housekeeper;

cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was smitten with a mania

for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting

plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung sentiment, improbable

incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of

concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments.

She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into Hamlet

and declaim in mock heroic style. From sixteen to twenty-three was her

apprenticeship to life. She taught, wrote for the papers, did

housework for pay as a servant, and found sewing a pleasant resource

because it was tranquillizing, left her free, and set her thoughts

going.

Mrs. Burnett,[23] like most women who record their childhood and

adolescent memories, is far more subjective and interesting than most

men. In early adolescence she was never alone when with flowers, but

loved to "speak to them, to bend down and say caressing things, to

stoop and kiss them, to praise them for their pretty ways of looking

up at her as into the eyes of a friend and beloved. There were certain

little blue violets which always seemed to lift their small faces

childishly, as if they were saying, 'Kiss me; don't go by like that.'"

She would sit on the porch, elbows on knees and chin on hands, staring

upward, sometimes lying on the grass. Heaven was so high and yet she

was a part of it and was something even among the stars. It was a

weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeling as she stared so fixedly and

intently that the earth seemed gone, left far behind. Every hour and

moment was a wonderful and beautiful thing. She felt on speaking terms

with the rabbits. Something was happening in the leaves which waved

and rustled as she passed. Just to walk, sit, lie around out of doors,

to loiter, gaze, watch with a heart fresh as a young dryad, following

birds, playing hide-and-seek with the brook-these were her halcyon

hours.

With the instability of genius, Beth[24] did everything suddenly. When

twelve or thirteen, she had grown too big to be carried, pulled or

pushed; she suddenly stood still one day, when her mother, commanded

her to dress. She had been ruled before by physical force, but her

will and that of her mother were now in collision, and the latter

realised she could make her do nothing unless by persuasion or moral

influence. Being constantly reproved, scolded, and even beaten by her

mother, Beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, and was rescued

with difficulty. She had spells of being miserable with no cause. She

was well and happy, but would burst into tears suddenly, which seemed

often to surprise her. Being very sensitive herself, she was morbidly

careful of the feelings of others and incessantly committed grave sins

of insincerity without compunction in her effort to spare them. To

those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought she

could do things, her nature expanded, but her mother checked her

mental growth over and over, instead of helping her by saying, "Don't

try, you can't do it," etc.

Just before the dawn of adolescence she had passed through a long

period of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a

servant. All the old woman's signs were very dominant in her life. She

even invented methods of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak

when I walk across the room I shall get through my lessons without

trouble." She always preferred to see two rooks together to one and

became expert in the black arts. She used to hear strange noises at

night for a time, which seemed signs and portents of disaster at sea,

fell into the ways of her neighbors, and had more faith in

incantations than in doctors' doses. She not only heard voices and

very ingeniously described them, but claimed to know what was going to

happen and compared her forebodings with the maid. She "got religion"

very intensely under the influence of her aunt, grew thin, lost her

appetite and sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in

hell, and tried to save them.

Beth never thought at all of her personal appearance until she

overheard a gentleman call her rather nice-looking, when her face

flushed and she had a new feeling of surprise and pleasure, and took

very clever ways of cross-examining her friends to find if she was

handsome. All of a sudden the care of her person became of great

importance, and every hint she had heard of was acted on. She aired

her bed, brushed her hair glossy, pinched her waist and feet, washed

in buttermilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appetite in every

way, put on gloves to do dirty work, etc.

The house always irked her. Once stealing out of the school by night,

she was free, stretched herself, drew a long breath, bounded and waved

her arms in an ecstasy of liberty, danced around the magnolia, buried

her face in the big flowers one after another and bathed it in the dew

of the petals, visited every forbidden place, was particularly

attracted to the water, enjoyed scratching and making her feet bleed

and eating a lot of green fruit. This liberty was most precious and

all through a hot summer she kept herself healthy by exercise in the

moonlight. This revived her appetite, and she ended these night

excursions by a forage in the kitchen. Beth had times when she

hungered for solitude and for nature. Sometimes she would shut herself

in her room, but more often would rove the fields and woods in

ecstasy. Coming home from school, where she had long been, she had to

greet the trees and fields almost before she did her parents. She had

a great habit of stealing out often by the most dangerous routes over

roofs, etc., at night in the moonlight, running and jumping, waving

her arms, throwing herself on the ground, rolling over, walling on

all-fours, turning somersaults, hugging trees, playing hide-and-seek

with the shadow fairy-folk, now playing and feeling fear and running

away. She invoked trees, stars, etc.

Beth's first love affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced

boy, who sat near her pew Sundays. They looked at each other once

during service, and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over her,

dwelt on his image, smiled, and even the next day felt a new desire to

please. She watched for him to pass from school. When he appeared,

"had a most delightful thrill shoot through her." The first impulse to

fly was conquered; she never thought a boy beautiful before. They

often met after dark, wrote; finally she grew tired of him because she

could not make him feel deeply, sent him off, called him an idiot, and

then soliloquized on the "most dreadful grief of her life." The latter

stages of their acquaintance she occasionally used to beat him, but

his attraction steadily waned. Once later, as she was suffering from a

dull, irresolute feeling due to want of a companion and an object, she

met a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her own, brightened as they

approached. It was the first appearance of nature's mandate to mate.

This friendly glance suffused her whole being with the "glory and

vision of love." Religion and young men were her need. They had stolen

interviews by night and many an innocent embrace and kiss, and almost

died once by being caught. They planned in detail what they would do

after they were married, but all was taken for granted without formal

vows. Only when criticized did they ever dream of caution and

concealment, and then they made elaborate parades of ignoring each

other in public and fired their imaginations with thoughts of

disguises, masks, etc. This passion was nipped in the bud by the boy's

removal from his school.

In preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer[25] became

sober and studious, proposing to model her life on that of each fresh

saint and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience with

vengeance. She wanted to revive the custom of public confession and

wrote letters of penitence and submission, which she tore up later,

finding her mind not "all of a piece." She lay prostrate on her

prie-dieu weeping from ecstasy, lying on the rim of heaven held by

angels, wanting to die, now bathed in bliss or aching intolerably with

spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old nature often

reasserted itself. Religion at that time became an intense emotion

nourished on incense, music, tapers, and a feeling of being tangible.

It was rapturous and sensuous. While under its spell, she seemed to

float and touch the wings of angels. Here solemn Gregorian chants are

sung, so that when one comes back to earth there is a sense of hunger,

deception, and self-loathing. Now she came to understand how so many

sentimental and virtuous souls sought oblivion in the narcotic of

religious excitement. Here, at the age of twelve, youth began and

childhood ended with her book.

Pathetic is the account of Helen Keller's effort to understand the

meaning of the word "love" in its season.[26]

Is it the sweetness of flowers? she asked. No, said her teacher. Is it

the warm sun? Not exactly. It can not be touched, "'but you feel the

sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love, you would not

be happy or want to play.' The beautiful truth burst upon my mind. I

felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and

the spirit of others." This period seems to have came gradually and

naturally to this wonderful child, whose life has been perhaps the

purest ever lived and one of the sweetest. None has ever loved every

aspect of nature accessible to her more passionately, or felt more

keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful sentiments. The unhappy

Frost King episode has been almost the only cloud upon her life, which

unfortunately came at about the dawn of this period, that is perhaps

better marked by the great expansion of mind which she experienced at

the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, when she was thirteen. About this

time, too, her great ambition of going to college and enjoying all the

advantages that other girls did, which, considering her handicap, was

one of the greatest human resolutions, was strengthened and deepened.

The fresh, spontaneous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind,

which felt that each individual could comprehend all the experiences

and emotions of the race and that chafed at every pedagogical and

technical obstacle between her soul and nature, and the great

monuments of literature, show that she has conserved to a remarkable

degree, which the world will wish may be permanent, the best impulses

of this golden age.

Marie Bashkirtseff,[27] who may be taken as one of the best types of

exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, was rich and of noble birth,

and began in 1873, at the age of twelve, to write a journal that

should be absolutely true and frank, with no pretense, affectation, or

concealment. The journal continues until her death, October, 1884, at

the age of twenty-three. It may be described as in some sense a

feminine counterpart of Rousseau's confessions, but is in some

respects a more precious psychological document than any other for the

elucidation of the adolescent ferment in an unusually vigorous and

gifted soul. Twice I have read it from cover to cover and with growing

interest.

At twelve she is passionately in love with a duke, whom she sometimes

saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds many

air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life

together. She prays passionately to see him again, would dazzle him on

the stage, would lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and would be

an ideal wife. She agonizes before the glass on whether or not she is

pretty, and resolves to ask some young man, but prefers to think well

of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates over into

passionate prayer to God to grant all her wishes; is oppressed with

despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in God because she

prayed Him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn English, both

of which He granted. At church some prayers and services seem directly

aimed at her; Paris now seems a frightful desert, and she has no

motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. She has freaky and

very changeable ideas of arranging the things in her room. When she

hears of the duke's marriage she almost throws herself over a bridge,

prays God for pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it

horrible to dissemble her feelings in public; goes through the torture

of altering her prayer about the duke. She is disgusted with common

people, harrowed by jealousy, envy, deceit and every hideous feeling,

yet feels herself frozen in the depth, and moving only on the surface.

When her voice improves she welcomes it with tears and feels an

all-powerful queen. The man she loves should never speak to another.

Her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book that ever

was or ever will be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure

that no one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please

her; thinks herself a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in

dreams her future husband, and quarrels with her photographs.

In some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed,

everything smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the

next paragraph the fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and

things seem asleep and unreal. Her attempts to express her feelings

drive her to desperation because words are inadequate. She loves to

weep, gives up to despair to think of death, and finds everything

transcendently exquisite. She comes to despise men and wonder whether

the good are always stupid and the intelligent always false and

saturated with baseness, but on the whole believes that some time or

other she is destined to meet one true good and great man. Now she is

inflated with pride of her ancestry, her gifts, and would subordinate

everybody and everything; she would never speak a commonplace word,

and then again feels that her life has been a failure and she is

destined to be always waiting. She falls on her knees sobbing, praying

to God with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost vows

to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to

devote her money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age;

wonders if she can ever love again. On throwing a bouquet from a

window into a crowd in the Corso a young man choked so beautifully a

workman who caught it that by that one act of strangling and snatching

the bouquet she fell in love. The young man calls and they see each

other often. Now she is clad from head to foot in an armor of cold

politeness, now vanity and now passion seem uppermost in their

meetings. She wonders if a certain amount of sin, like air, is

necessary to a man to sustain life. Finally they vow mutual love and

Pietro leaves, and she begins to fear that she has cherished illusions

or been insulted; is torments at things unsaid or of her spelling in

French. She coughs and for three days has a new idea that she is going

to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in

her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders

if God takes intentions into account; resolves to read the New

Testament, but can not find one and reads Dumas instead. In

novel-reading she imagines herself the heroine of every scene; sees

her lover and they plan their mode of life together and at last kiss

each other, but later she feels humiliated, chilled, doubts if it is

real love; studies the color of her lips to see if they have changed;

fears that she has compromised herself; has eye symptoms that make her

fear blindness. Once on reading the Testament she smiled and clasped

her hands, gazed upward, was no longer herself but in ecstasy; she

makes many programs for life; is haunted by the phrase "We live but

once"; wants to live a dozen lives in one, but feels that she does not

live one-fourth of a life; has several spells of solitary

illumination. At other times she wishes to be the center of a salon

and imagines herself to be so. She soars on poets' wings, but often

has hell in her heart; slowly love is vowed henceforth to be a word

without meaning to her. Although she suffers from _ennui_, she

realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and cannot bear

the thought of losing a moment of her life; criticizes her mother;

scorns marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman can attain,

but pants for glory; now hates, now longs to see new faces; thinks of

disguising herself as a poor girl and going out to seek her fortunes;

thinks her mad vanity is her devil; that her ambitions are justified

by no results; hates moderation in anything, would have intense and

constant excitement or absolute repose; at fifteen abandons her idea

of the duke but wants an idol, and finally decides to live for fame;

studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to gauge her success in life; tries

target-shooting, hits every time and feels it to be fateful; at times

despises her mother because she is so easily influenced by her; meets

another man whose affection for her she thinks might be as reverent as

religion and who never profaned the purity of his life by a thought,

but finally drops him because the possible disappointment would be

unbearable; finds that the more unhappy any one is for love of us the

happier we are; wonders why she has weeping spells; wonders what love

that people talk so much about really is, and whether she is ever to

know. One night, at the age of seventeen, she has a fit of despair

which vents itself in moans until arising, she seizes the dining-room

clock, rushes out and throws it into the sea, when she becomes happy.

"Poor clock!"

At another time she fears she has used the word love lightly and

resolves to no longer invoke God's help, yet in the next line prays

Him to let her die as everything is against her, her thoughts are

incoherent, she hates herself and everything is contemptible; but she

wishes to die peacefully while some one is singing a beautiful air of

Verdi. Again she thinks of shaving her head to save the trouble of

arranging her hair; is crazed to think that every moment brings her

nearer death; to waste a moment of life is infamous, yet she can trust

no one; all the freshness of life is gone; few things affect her now;

she wonders how in the past she could have acted so foolishly and

reasoned so wisely; is proud that no advice in the world could ever

keep her from doing anything she wished. She thinks the journal of her

former years exaggerated and resolves to be moderate; wants to make

others feel as she feels; finds that the only cure for disenchantment

with life is devotion to work; fears her face is wearing an anxious

look instead of the confident expression which was its chief charm.

"Impossible" is a hideous, maddening word; to think of dying like a

dog as most people do and leaving nothing behind is a granite wall

against which she every instant dashes her head. If she loved a man,

every expression of admiration for anything, or anybody else in her

presence would be a profanation. Now she thinks the man she loves must

never know what it is to be in want of money and must purchase

everything he wishes; must weep to see a woman want for anything, and

find the door of no palace or club barred to him. Art becomes a great

shining light in her life of few pleasures and many griefs, yet she

dares hope for nothing.

At eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in the

name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for her wishes. She would like

to be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the _prix de Rome_

under the guise of a man and marry Napoleon IV. On winning a medal for

her pictures she does nothing but laugh, cry, and dream of greatness,

but the next day is scolded and grows discouraged. She has an immense

sense of growth and transformation, so that not a trace of her old

nature remains; feels that she has far too much of some things, and

far too little of others in her nature; sees defects in her mother's

character, whose pertinacity is like a disease; realizes that one of

her chief passions is to inspire rather than to feel love; that her

temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores that her family

expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her the stimulus of

expecting nothing; declares that she thanks a million thoughts for

every word that she writes; is disgusted with and sometimes absolutely

hates herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is

right that all things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for

such "abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is

grieved to feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual

world, to see, learn, and know everything; admires Balzac because he

describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves Fleury, who has shown

her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling

complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels that she

is losing her grip on art and also on God, who no longer hears her

prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is not famous at thirty.

At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient

cries, calls on God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears

that the young French prince about whom she has spun romances was

killed by the Kaffirs; feels herself growing serious and sensible;

despises death; realizes that God is not what she thought, but is

perhaps Nature and Life or is perhaps Chance; she thinks out possible

pictures she might paint; develops a Platonic friendship for her

professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but

spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at

nineteen finds three grey hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she

cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes; makes many

good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream; has

spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor finds a serious lung

trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and flannel, she

at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror

of her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary; feels

herself too precocious and doomed; deplores especially that

consumption will cost her her good looks; has fits of intense anger

alternating with tears; concludes that death is annihilation; realizes

the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that some time

or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and returns to

belief in miracle, and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; distributes one

thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow

through her brain at night and the strange sensations by day. Her eye

symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; she grows superstitious,

believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to

embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies God and death;

sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of

human cowardice, but has a strange intoxication with blood and would

like to thrust a lance into the neck of every one she meets; coquets a

great deal with the thought of marriage; takes up her art and paints a

few very successful pictures; tries to grapple with the terrible

question, "What is my unbiased opinion concerning myself?" pants

chiefly for fame. When the other lung is found diseased the diary

becomes sometimes more serious, sometimes more fevered; she is almost

racked to find some end in life; shall she marry, or paint? and at

last finds much consolation in the visits of Bastien-Lepage, who comes

to see her often while he is dying of some gastric trouble. She keeps

up occasional and often daily entries in her journal until eleven days

before her death, occurring in October, 1884, at the age of

twenty-three, and precipitated by a cold incurred while making an

open-air sketch.

The confessional outpourings of Mary MacLane[28] constitute a unique

and valuable adolescent document, despite the fact that it seems

throughout affected and written for effect; however, it well

illustrates a real type, although perhaps hardly possible save in this

country, and was inspired very likely by the preceding.

She announces at the outset that she is odd, a genius, an extreme

egotist; has no conscience; despises her father, "Jim MacLane of

selfish memory"; loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her

strength and grace of body, although her daily life is an "empty

damned weariness." She is a female Napoleon passionately desiring

fame; is both a philosopher and a coward; her heart is wooden;

although but nineteen, she feels forty; desires happiness even more

than fame, for an hour of which she would give up at once fame, money,

power, virtue, honor, truth, and genius to the devil, whose coming she

awaits. She discusses her portrait, which constitutes the

frontispiece; is glad of her good strong body, and still awaits in a

wild, frenzied impatience the coming of the devil to take her

sacrifice, and to whom she would dedicate her life. She loves but one

in all the world, an older "anemone" lady, once her teacher. She ran

not distinguish between right and wrong; love is the only thing real

which will some day bring joy, but it is agony to wait. "Oh, dame!

damn! damn! damn! every living thing in the world!--the universe be

damned!" herself included. She is "marvelously deep," but thanks the

good devil who has made her without conscience and virtue so that she

may take her happiness when it comes. Her soul seeks but blindly, for

nothing answers. How her happiness will seethe, quiver, writhe, shine,

dance, rush, surge, rage, blare, and wreak with love and light when it

comes!

The devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel,

conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and

would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds imaginary

conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon she will

commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. In

Butte, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers,

the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and

barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the

bathroom make her wild and profane. She flirts with death at the top

of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she

yielded herself to Death, who would dearly love to have her. She

confesses herself a thief on several occasions, but comforts herself

because the stolen money was given to the poor. Sometimes her "very

good legs" carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary

love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and

cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen.

She has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind

devil, deliver me"--as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine

men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls, lisle-thread

stockings, the books of A.C. Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers, soft

old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin spoons, false teeth,

thin shoes, etc. She does not seem real to herself everything is a

blank. Though she doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom

of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her heart.

When something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is

for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that people

call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can

fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for

Messalina. She most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in

the sky. "I would live about seven years of judicious badness, and

then death if you will." "I long to cultivate the of badness in me."

She describes the fascination of making and eating fudge; devotes a

chapter to describing how to eat an olive; discusses her figure. "In

the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs

cunningly distributed." She discusses her foot, her beautiful hair,

her hips; describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of

Napoleon that she keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows

she would give up even her marvelous genius far one dear, bright day

free from loneliness. When her skirts need sewing, she simply pins

them; this lasts longer, and had she mended them with needle and

thread she would have been sensible, which she hates. As she walks

over the sand one day she vows that she would like a man to come so be

that he was strong and a perfect villain and she would pray him to

lead her to what the world calls her ruin. Nothing is of consequence

to her except to be rid of unrest and pain. She would be positively

and not merely negatively wicked. To poison her soul would rouse her

mental power. "Oh, to know just once what it is to be loved!" "I know

that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often

thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. The world

is ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving

for love.

Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is

desperately in earnest.[29] She began to teach school in a squalid,

dismal Italian village, and at eighteen to write the poetry that has

made her famous. She lived in a dim room back of a stable, up two

flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and where she

seems to have been, like her mother, a mill head before she was a

teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with

enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountain, or even a hill, lake, or

large city, but she had read of them. After she began to write,

friends gave her two dream days in the city. Then she returned, put on

her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to spell. The

poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience.

She craved "the kiss of genius and of light;" but the awful figure of

misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes:

"I have no name--my home a hovel damp;

I grew up from the mire;

Wretched and outcast folk my family,

And yet within me burns a flame of fire."

There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. The

black abyss attracts her yet she is softened by a child's caress. She

laughs at the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over

thin, wan children without bread. Her whole life goes into song. The

boy criminal on the street fascinates her and she would kiss him. She

writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. If death comes, she fears

"that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and pictures

herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog and her

well-made body "disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade"

as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and still

gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones, and veins at will,

wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the

mystery of pain, until from her "dead breast gurgles a gasp of

malediction." Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of

crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty

falls, on her heart; the sultry factories where "monsters, of steel,

huge engines, snort all day," and where the pungent air poisons the

blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the mason who felt from a

high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends,

all inspire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor.

Misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions

had overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all

the hope from her breast with which she had defied it. A wretched old

man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his

happy though humble prime. There is the song of the pickaxe brandished

in revolution when mobs cry "Peace, labor bread," and in mines of

industry beneath the earth. She loves the "defeated" in whose house no

fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes of the mutilation

of a woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen years "a loom, two

handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to

me." She is inspired by a master of the forge beating a red-hot bar,

with his bare neck swelled. He is her demon, her God, and her pride in

him is ecstasy. She describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense

that they fight and bite, and the pure joy of a guileless,

intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She longs for infinite

stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on

her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the

hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out

in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a

blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice

of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her

"sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent."

She imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her,

while her naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely

dale. She imprecates the licentious world of crafty burghers,

coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires, cursed geese and serpents

that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she would smite in the

face with her indignant verse. "Thou crawlest and I soar." She chants

the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are ground and

bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. She pants for

war with outrage and with wrong; questions the abyss for its secret;

hears moans and flying shudders; and sees phantoms springing from

putrid tombs. The full moon is an old malicious spy, peeping

stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a cursed cage, and

prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light, and

let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite

space will satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent

spirit might bear her away on unbridled wings. In one poem she

apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against

unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull

grinning and showing its teeth. She would be possessed by her and

thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf beggar wrings her heart

with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. Though a daring peasant,

she will be free and sing out her pæan to the sun, though amid the

infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise of hammers

and wheels.

Literary men who record their experiences during this stage seem to

differ from women in several important respects. First, they write with

less abandon. I can recall no male MacLanes. A Bashkirtseff would be

less impossible, and a Negri with social reform in her heart is still

less so. But men are more prone to characterize their public

metamorphoses later in life, when they are a little paled, and perhaps

feel less need of confessionalism for that reason. It would, however, be

too hazardous to elaborate this distinction too far. Secondly and more

clearly, men tend to vent their ephebic calentures more in the field of

action. They would break the old moorings of home and strike out new

careers, or vent their souls in efforts and dreams of reconstructing the

political, industrial, or social world. Their impracticabilities are

more often in the field of practical life and remoter from their own

immediate surroundings. This is especially true in our practical

country, which so far lacks subjective characterizations of this age of

eminent literary merit, peculiarly intense as it is here. Thirdly, they

erupt in a greater variety of ways, and the many kinds of genius and

talent that now often take possession of their lives like fate are more

varied and individual. This affords many extreme contrasts, as, e.g.,

between Trollope's pity for, and Goethe's apotheosis of his youth;

Mill's loss of feeling, and Jefferies's unanalytic, passionate outbursts

of sentiment; the esthetic ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive

religious emancipation of Fielding Hall; the moral and religious

supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who was a reincarnation of medieval

monkhood, and the riotous storminess of Müller and Ebers; the

abnormalities and precocity of De Quincey, and the steady, healthful

growth of Patterson; the simultaneity of a fleshly and spiritual love in

Keller and Goethe, and the duality of Pater, with his great and

tyrannical intensification of sensation for nature and the sequent

mysticity and symbolism. In some it is fulminating but episodic, in

others gradual and lifelong like the advent of eternal spring. Fourth,

in their subjective states women outgrow less in their consciousness,

and men depart farther from their youth, in more manifold ways. Lastly,

in its religious aspects, the male struggles more with dogma, and his

enfranchisement from it is more intellectually belabored. Yet, despite

all these differences, the analogies between the sexes are probably yet

more numerous, more all-pervasive. All these biographic facts reveal

nothing not found in _questionnaire_ returns from more ordinary youth,

so that for our purposes they are only the latter, writ large because

superior minds only utter what all more inwardly feel. The arrangement

by nationality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference

unless it be the above American peculiarity.

In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey[30] remembered feeling

that life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to

which time the influence of his sister three years older had brooded

over him.

His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur

before he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tendencies

were constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was upon

the first glimpse that this was a world of evil. He had been brought

up in great seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and oppression in

a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a female

servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death plunged

him into early pessimism. He felt that little Jane would come back

certainly in the spring with the roses, and he was glad that his utter

misery with the blank anarchy confusion which her death brought could

not be completely remembered. He stole into the chamber where her

corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the saddest he ever heard,

that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand

centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind he often had

heard since, and it brought back the open summer window and the

corpse. A vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed

there, standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that could not

die was at his heart, for this was the holy love between children that

could not perish. The funeral was full of darkness and despair for

him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed into the heavens to see

his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was alone. Thus,

before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already adolescent,

although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became dominant

and his awakening to it was hard.

As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, he

was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a

number of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters

in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested generosity,

courage, and fidelity. One night, after he had walked the streets for

weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not completed her

sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew very ill,

and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials and

tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. Many years

later he used to wander past this house, and he recalled with real

tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to meet the

"noble-minded Ann ----" with whom he had so often conversed familiarly

"_more Socratico_," whose betrayer he had vainly sought to punish, and

yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her some authentic

message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness.